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The President's Column: Our Union Rejects Today’s Poisonous Greed

June 28, 2017

The progressive values of 1199’s founders
became the DNA of our Union.

I’m so proud of 1199SEIU for many
reasons, but one that I’m most proud
about is our diversity. There are 196
countries in the world and I’d be
surprised if there are many that aren’t
represented in our union. When
you include all the denominations,
there are some two dozen major
religions practiced in our country and
1199 members are included in all of
them. And of course we also have
thousands of non-believers. 1199ers
can be counted across the political
spectrum. And yet we are all together
in one union.

For anyone unfamiliar with 1199
history, it wasn’t always like this.
Our union was formed in 1932 as a
pharmacists and drugstore workers’
organization. The few thousand
members were nearly all white men,
and predominantly Jewish. The
founding president, Leon Davis, was
an immigrant from Poland whose
family fled severe poverty, anti-
Semitism and political repression.

The progressive values that led
Davis to organize 1199 became the
DNA of our union. These included the
rights of workers to a voice on the job
and a decent living; the willingness to
“go to the mat” with the employers to
achieve this; the necessity of unity of
the membership and of solidarity with
workers everywhere.

These same values led Leon
Davis and his co-workers, some 25
years later, to organize the tens of
thousands of workers in New York
City’s voluntary hospitals—risking
jail as this was against the law at the
time—understanding that this new,
much larger membership would be
predominantly African-American and
Latina women, thereby fundamentally
changing the culture of 1199
forevermore.

That decision, and the heroic
organizing drives that followed, was
taken nearly 60 years ago. And we
have now grown to embrace hospital
workers, nurses, nursing home
workers, homecare workers and
every other sector of the healthcare
industry, not only in New York City
but throughout New York State,
and in Massachusetts, New Jersey,
Maryland and Washington D.C. and
Florida.

Former NYC Mayor David Dinkins,
used to refer to New York City as
“a gorgeous mosaic,” and I like to
think of our union members that
way. Our diversity—and our unity in
diversity—is our greatest strength.
Being an 1199er, it is always
shocking to see news photos of
the Trump Administration and
Congressional leaders, who are nearly
always a collection of white men.

Clearly this is not representative of what
our country looks like. The traditional
motto of the United States, printed on
our coins and dollar bills, is the Latin
e pluribus unum—Out of many, one.

But we are now living under a national
political leadership that is perhaps the
most divisive in our history since the
days of Jim Crow apartheid.

All the more reason why we in
1199—whatever our color, faith,
political viewpoint, job classification,
neighborhood, country of origin,
gender or sexual orientation—need
to embrace the original slogan of
the American labor movement: “An
injury to one is an injury to all.” Or, as
the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said
in another context, “We must learn
to live together as brothers, or we are
going to perish together as fools.”

We are living through a time when
greed of a truly monstrous kind is
being promoted by the most powerful
men in our government—taking
money from poor and working people
and from the government programs
for which we’ve fought so long,
and giving it to already obscenely
wealthy individuals and corporations.
Unquestionably, this message is also
being fostered by many employers
in our country. Their most powerful
weapon to achieve this is to divide
our people—against those of other
beliefs, colors, national origins,
genders, and so on.

By its example, our union stands
as a strong rejection of this poisonous
ideology. By its example of unity
in diversity, 1199 holds important
lessons for our children, our
communities and our fellow workers.

We take encouragement from
Catholic social teaching under
Pope Francis that human solidarity
empowers everyone to attain their
full potential through each of us
respecting each other’s dignity, rights
and responsibilities and makes the
world a better place to live.

Labor movements throughout the
world have long embraced the slogan
of the working class of Chile, “El
pueblo unido jamás será vencido.” The
people united will never be defeated!
Let’s keep that in mind as we face the
difficult challenges ahead.